"when we typically train our machine learning models, we’re feeding in historical electricity prices as well as the state of the grid at that time. So for example, we might want to know what the inner connector limits are. ***So how much energy can we flow across certain portions of the grid as well as what the flows were at that time.*** "

above from espressolover's recommended podcast

back in the day when I had 9,000 megawatts of installed capacity at my fingertips, it would have been illegal for me to know those numbers

("current" in both the temporal sense of "what's it doing right now", and "current" in the electrical sense of "how much electricity is flowing through what nodes")

the other stuff was legal to know, but back in the day not everybody was hip to doing web scrapings ... and so they downloaded spreadsheets of yesterday's 5-minute nodal prices. (although a certain head trader had custom coded up an APL web scraping doohickey)

@Tony C: As the power IT boy few posts on here have given me more of a kick than this ‘head trader coding up our nodal download doohickey’ stuff. Looks like I’m out of a job!

Ironically I think our head power trader is a former software engineer, but he is not in a position to be dealing with the ever changing ISO nodal download formats, nodal model updates, FTR results, the “who knows” how many other things that we rely on that just haven’t broken yet so I don’t even know they exist. I feel like power is a never ending ball of yarn and I’m only tugging at the ends I see sticking out. Imagine the absurdity of the head trader coming in every day and having to get risk back up themselves because one of the myriad of download jobs failed. 50% of their time would be zapped right there.

Over the years I’ve quite enjoyed your posts on commodities on here and as I’ve gotten started in (or perhaps “a row over from” would a better term...) this business they’ve become more interesting. Perhaps I will try to put a face to the name at the next NYC Drinks if you care to.

way way way back in the day, the head trader of the largest independent power producer in the United States was an APL coder.

slightly less far back in the day, the guy who ran more independent installed capacity than anybody else in ISO-NE was an APL coder (sure Northeast was slightky bigger than us, but Northeast was a goddamn public utility, we were the biggest guys inside the NEMA circle, and we were independent)

WAY WAY WAY WAY BEFORE ANY OF THAT the guy that wound up doing all of that weighed 165 lbs and was varsity in 3 sports...... and now, I'm old, and fat, and I run out of breath trying to tie my shoes

I'm none of those guys anymore, as Don Ameche said to Joe Montegna in a David Mamet film, "things change"

if you'd like to grab a drink ... some old folks on this phorum might tell you of private dinners had in the upstairs dining room at ALTO, ... but that's closed now, so we'll have to crack open a couple of bottles of wine at Marea or ai'Fiori, or Jockey Hollow if you're in New Jersey

2-3 yrs ago my energy provider was sending salesmen around trying to convince people to install it in house.

here is the thing.https://www.rvo.nl/onderwerpen/duurzaam-ondernemen/gebouwen/hoe-werkt-de-slimme-meter

Third party marketing company called me few months ago quoting pretty accurate energy consumption in my house trying to convince me to switch the supplier to the cheaper one. When asked how do you know my bill as I did not install the SmartMeter, the man replied "But almost all your neighbours did. We can intra/extrapolate your numbers" (can imagine).

Temperature measurement by SmartMeter was a misstatement, but if we have multiple IOT in the house, that measurement will be just a matter of time.